All right.
So if you agree, we are going to get started because otherwise
everything is going to have some backlog.
So we are very excited today because we've got four speakers.
This is going to be the best session. Okay.
Much better than the keynotes, much better than the other sessions.
We've got four people, four speakers and the very first one.
I'm very sorry about these language really, because they gave it to me
20 minutes ago.
It's not a Castillo webinar who is a school
translator and interpreter for English and German
and an associate professor at the University of Cordoba here in Spain.
Her research focuses
on a specialized translation in German as a foreign language,
combined with audio visual translation as a teaching method.
She is the chief editor of the journal Panacea,
which is have very well respected and renowned journal here in Spain
and internationally of an idea of medicine, language and translation.
She has published over 25 articles from 30 book chapters
and has been being a visiting scholar at Wolverhampton University,
UK Hildesheim University in Germany,
Lincoln University in Hong Kong, and Sleep quality, Massachusetts.
Thank you very much, Paula and George.
Thank you very much for the kind introduction, Alberto.
I would like to thank the organizers of the conference because it is great
to be here and very much looking forward to this panel.
And I'm going to talk to you
about closed captions, which is sort of highlighted
because it's a blurry concept at the moment in some platforms.
I applied these so-called closed captions to the German
foreign language classroom and the technical translation
classroom, and we shall be comparing the results for both subjects.
So the goals of this study to raise awareness on technical issues,
which currently in automatic
subtitles in platforms such as YouTube,
then to establish a baseline for German as a second language
and for the technical translation courses
regarding their subtitling competence and of course to improve
students competence of both German
and technical translation from German into Spanish.
And I would very much like to fine tune the methodology,
and I have encountered some issues that we will discuss later.
So what I did is I applied automatic subtitle into the classroom.
It's called Closed Captions
on YouTube, and I'm sure you have all seen the CC symbol.
And this is one of the of the things that students were very much puzzled
about, about the CC
and what's the difference between closed captions and subtitles?
Because in translation studies we always talk about subtitles.
And what we did was using YouTube, we downloaded the automatic subtitles
and then we did the so-called pre editing, which is
you do edit the text, you correct the text because of course
it's it uses voice recognition software and it's not perfect.
It's a transcription, but it's very much flawed.
So after correcting the German
original, we translate into Spanish
and the students are supposed to follow the guidelines
and protocols regarding subtitles, so they're supposed to transform
what is a flawed transcription into a proper subtitles.
And then we also conducted a student
survey to see what they think about their competencies.
So as to the background, of course, and we all know what professional
subtitles are, and a professional subtitle works with a template.
And then translates into the mother language mainly.
But when you use automatic subtitles, you have to be aware
of the technical constraints.
It incorporates automatic transcription of the speech.
And this comes without any punctuation marks, with many spelling mistakes,
and then it uses machine translation to translate that text,
which is already flawed into another language.
So you can imagine what comes out of that.
It's pretty much useless in most cases.
Also, we should mention that spotting is done
automatically, so it's not perfect, it's not perfectly synchronized.
And the segments is basically the toughest part.
No points, no commas,
and a very bad segmentation
makes that day automatic translation is useless.
So what Carol Hunter and her colleagues highlight is that
there are many, many issues and the main issues are the speech
or audio recognition errors and the segmentation mistakes.
This is what is causing automatic subtitles nowadays
to be very bad translations.
So to speak.
As to our classroom methodology in the German
foreign language class, students record their own videos.
Speaking in German about the topic of their liking.
So it can be a book, a series of anything they like and they generate.
They upload the video to YouTube and they generate the automatic subtitles
which are then downloaded and they're supposed to pre edit the subtitles.
So to correct the German, and then they're supposed to translate
the subtitles from German into Spanish and they're supposed to follow
subtitling protocols.
So to, as I said, to
transform the transcription into a progressive type. Of.
In the technical translation classroom,
the they do the same
thing, but they do not use their own video.
So they use an existing video which is specialized in content.
In this case, I use the
Agri-Food
Translation video focusing on the making of Carmen
Serrano, which is a topic they are sufficiently familiar with,
and thus we remove the problem
of them not knowing about the topic.
So what I did was to first investigate
what they think are the competencies regarding subtitles.
Then I check if their correction of the German is good,
or if they make many errors.
Errors mean that they forget
to use capital letters for German nouns
or they forget to do writing commas on points
and then the errors revise in the subtitles.
So are the subtitles too long?
Are the is the segmentation wrongly done?
Are they separating
the verb from the subject and the adjective from the noun?
So all of those things,
these are the errors that I was looking for.
So German spelling, punctuation and grammar
errors and speech recognition inaccuracies.
This is very important in the German as a second language class
because since they are recording their own videos,
when they see the transcription, they see that the machine is,
you know,
is making errors in the transcription
because they do not properly pronounce something.
So this helps them know where their shortcomings
are regarding the pronunciation.
And in the technical translation video, this is a little bit
more tricky because of course it's not their own video,
so they don't know what the video says.
They have to listen to the German and sometimes they're unable
to identify the transcription errors because they
they are not it's not video they have they have produced themselves.
So segmentation errors, if they did something correctly
or they did not correct something, which they were supposed to correct,
and the subtitling techniques as described here,
which are for example, they are supposed to use elision
techniques, compression techniques and to respect the format of subtitles.
So as to the survey,
I asked three questions Do you have experience with closed captions?
Do they know what the post captions are
in the German?
It's a second language class.
The vast majority were not aware of what closed captions, so
they were very insecure.
They didn't know if the is the sustainer subtitles.
I've seen the symbol. Many of them said
I've seen the symbol, but I don't know what it means.
And in the technical translation classroom, which is
the German classroom is taught in the second year of the B.A.
and the technical translation classroom is settled
at the third year.
So this, of course, means that third year students are at
the little bit more aware and knowledgeable in general.
The second question was what's the difference
between closed captions and provisional subtitles?
Well, they think they know the answer, but when you ask them
about professional subtitle standards, which is a third question,
we see that they think they know.
But in the case of the German students, they they do not.
They think that the translator should be faithful and correct,
which is, of course, a very vague
answer regarding protocols for subtitling.
Whereas in the technical translation classroom,
the students thought they didn't know so well, but they did know.
They did describe extensively what the subtitles should look like,
how many characters the time of
viewing 2 seconds
on screen and stuff like that, the segmentation, the compression.
They were very much aware of the of the protocols.
So as to the number of errors,
when I was looking at the texts they had corrected
in the German as a second
language classroom, they make many mistakes
because they do not use the capital letters for German or
they do not use proper punctuation or do not correct grammar mistakes.
These were the vast majority of mistakes and then the segmentation.
They also have traveled channel
with the segments and they fared better in subtitles.
So you can see that the editing of the German text was tough for them
and the subtitling part of the assignment was better.
They were better at translating than they were at,
you know, correcting the German, which is not surprising really,
because for them, German is a second language.
It's difficult.
And I brought a couple of examples.
For example, they did not correct the Americanism film.
This is supposed to be a masculine noun, so an American share film.
The second part, they did correct the protagonist
because in the speech recognition software
it said protagonist because the pronunciation
of the student was not correct.
So that was corrected by them.
Segmentation is incorrect in the subtitles 17
because it says, and Frank has always been loud at one villa.
So it's two person, two people speaking.
It should be two different lines.
And then there are no points
and you do not separate Villa from the rest of the sentence.
They should have segmented this property.
Other mistakes.
For example, they the subtitle which is highlighted
in yellow, The whole thing is way too long
and there is a spelling mistake
at concentration content sections lag out, it's making a mess.
So these are the mistakes they make.
Also, when they are translating, they also make mistakes
in segmentation, for example, that the E at the end of the line
is you're not supposed to leave a connector at the end of the line.
They're supposed to to bring it to the next line
and they make some mistakes in the order of the sentence.
So it should be.
Student This is the sign you're going to need it.
They have inverted the order.
They are allowed to impart the order, but not if it comes with a
the mistake in the meaning of the sentence
or an improper construction of the sentence.
And you see that there is another step that is just way too long.
List this if you put them in those videos
and then in the last line we have a grammar mistake.
It's very muscolo again, these potato,
whereas previously they were speaking in a formal way.
Okay, so as to the technical translation classroom,
this video was, as I said, about commas.
Rana, you can see in the subtitle that there are no points and no commas
and there are segmentation mistakes in then it's a prepositional phrase.
It should be brought into the second part of the subtitle.
So they did a lot of mistakes with spelling, punctuation and grammar.
This is a constant.
This is one of the things I really, really need to address in class.
They do not correct the German properly
and the segmentation is a huge issue as well.
And segmentation is basically the most
important thing of this assignment because I want them to be aware
that it is impossible to obtain an automatic translation
unless the source text is perfect or nearly perfect,
and the segmentation is the huge part of that problem.
So yeah, we have to focus on spelling and segmentation
the bit better when translating this title.
So some of them were too long and some of them
were also improperly segmented.
So some of the examples you are not supposed to separate
a an activity from the known Spanish as the Ranasinghe
some capitals
letters they did not use an endorphin.
Yeah.
And some of them are also too long and they did not really
recognize where a point was supposed to happen.
And when a sentence was supposed to finish. And.
And as today translation.
Will.
Again some mistakes in the segmentation
separating words from nouns or
in the last in the third one they they bring a comma
to the end of the sentence which is not correct.
Some problems with the concordance for last
says it's missing in this
and as the results if we compare the German
as a second language and the technical translation
correction of the German text, we see that they
they make more mistakes in the technical translation class,
which is not surprising because when you correct your own view,
of course you know what you were saying
and of course it is a bit easier to correct evidence
which you have produced and video which with the specialized context
is more difficult to correct. So this is not surprising.
Of course, in the first
class, in the German class, they do not miss,
they do not miss any voice, any speech recognition, mistakes
because they know what they wanted to say.
And when they see the subtitles, okay, I did not find out that properly.
And these I need to correct.
So it's also to be expected.
And then as to subtitling, we see that many mistakes
are related to the spelling and also to the segmentation.
It's a problem.
So as a conclusions then I hope I'm not talking too much.
I did find out that there was this subtitle literacy
in the second Jewish students, so they were pretty much lost about
segmentation rules and society and rules and what close captions are.
There is a dire need of training early on because the longer
you wait, the more prejudices they can be regarding subtitles.
But I think it's worth working with subtitles from the early stages of the
of to be a closed captions is very much a known term.
They are not aware the closed relates to the capacity
of turning them off or making them visible again.
And that's it is basically a transcription
in the case of YouTube, it's not the original term.
I mean, closed captions only means subtitles
which can be turned on and off.
But in the case of YouTube, it's an automatic
transcription.
So you know, you see what a problem is, is the problem with the term
YouTube is using
as to the technical translation class,
we have a very heterogeneous student profile.
Some of the students are in the third year, some of
the students are in the fifth year and these students have had their
audio visual translation classrooms and they do know about subtitles.
So you have to cater for different subtitles competence
in this classroom.
And despite the self stated subtitling protocol knowledge
translation, students display more errors in editing
because the contents are predictably more complex.
And they are.
They have a certain lack of practice.
In general, more errors were committed
when committed when while pre editing due to the foreign language thing.
I mean it's a second foreign language.
So probably if you did this same thing with their first foreign language,
the results would be totally different.
Spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Grammar errors really need to be addressed in both subjects.
This is the main issue they have encountered both in German
and in Spanish.
Even if Spanish is near their mother tongue, which is pretty worrisome.
And for translation students, more examples of terminology
and cultural references are needed, and I need to implement
a different methodology with both subjects because
clearly they come from different points.
They the subject is not the same
and it needs a lot to find a fine tuning.
I think it would be very much interes.
Interesting to compare the machine translation into Spanish prior
and after pre editing the original text
because I think this is where they are going to realize
the importance of segmentation, of spelling and punctuation.
So I think this is the main part that was missing from the exercise
and this is where I will be focusing in in the next course is
So this was all thank you very much for your attention
and very much looking forward
to listen to my colleagues answer to any questions you may have.
It's thank you very much.
Well, thank you very much for an awesome
presentation on that remarkable piece of research and perfect timing.
Absolutely perfect timing. So thank you.
Is there any question from the audience?
Want to check it?
There are all nine questions.
Anything that you would like to ask the last two?
Well, I was paying attention.
Well, first of all, congratulations for the research.
And although I am an English teacher originally, I am always glad
when I see data and research
from languages other than English because of obvious reasons.
So I congratulate you for that.
And have you you haven't published yet
the because I think it is among the many, many conclusions
you've got the fact that there is not subtitle literacy and I loved that
that expression or sufficient subtitling did I need it?
It needs to be
made public for the authorities
when they designed the new degrees of translation of studies, etc..
It is to me which I cannot work in translation or studies directly.
It is quite surprising.
Thank you for the question.
I was discussing this with a colleague
who works in Seville and he said We have.
We haven't even got a subject, specific subject for subtitling.
So it's of course it's in the it's in the be a study plan and stuff.
But I think events such as this one and the research
we are seeing here is what is going to to achieve that.
Audio visual translation subtitles come to the language classroom
because it's such a great resource.
And the problem is many, many times people feel unqualified
to deal with them in the classroom.
I mean, teachers and of course students.
So I think rather than the study plan, it's it's worthwhile investigating
how to apply it to to other subjects and to the language classroom
because it really motivates students.
They are very motivated with such activities.
So I think
the work
in this conference is exactly the right for this.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
From my point of view,
I work with teachers in teacher training and they are very much
willing to to to use it with their own primary or secondary education.
And they need training for that from professionals.
So I also encourage you to collaborate in any, you know, any project.
Thank you very much. No questions
for the next presentation
that's looking at what's
difficult.
It's tough
like secrecy or anything like that, but we're talking about some theories.
But frankly,
I think some frameworks for
it's not enough.
Thank you for the question. And.
I cannot tell you a specific framework at the moment,
but I was discussing this with Antonio De Niro two days ago
and they are looking at the effective competencies.
Factor is the group which investigates the translation competence.
So translation, competence is just starting
to be applied, such as that as the European
Foreign Language framework or reference for the languages.
So they did something similar apply to translation and Antonio's work
in applying the back to levels to the subtitling
and the other visual translation.
But so I really need to check back with him on that
because this is very much to the point. Yes.
Thank you.
But I think we have one more question to
this.
So let's Spanish. Yeah,
Yeah. There.
Thank you for the question. Well.
The point is that in translation we mainly work towards the mother
tongue.
It's worth investigating other language combinations, no doubt.
And basically it would be very interesting
to use, you know, translation into the foreign language
because you learn a lot
when translating from your mother tongue into the foreign language.
But for example, for the technical translation classroom, it is
set in the study plan that that they are working from German into Spanish.
So it could be possible in the German as a as a foreign language classroom.
You could work in the other direction.
You could work you should work in German.
Come to think of it, it's a wonderful idea.
But in the technical translation classroom, we are supposed to work
with this language combination from German to Spanish.
And yet I think in the foreign language classroom, this
this would be a great idea to to learn further.
Thank you
right it just 1:00 so absolutely perfect timing.